I think fabric creation and weaving is fascinating. We had a chance in Varanasi India, to see a craftsman manually weaving a jacquard piece of fabric.

The Jacquard Loom was invented in the early 1800’s and drastically simplified making wovens with textures. The cards with the holes in them determine which threads are going up or down.

Previous to that, the weaving changes would be memorized by the weaver with the harness being manually raised or lowered to make the design….Entirely too complicated to even imagine for me.
Brocades, damasks, and matelasse type fabrics are all made this way now – on power looms that go thousands of times faster than this.

If you remember Fortran decks and punch cards that programmed computers, this preceded and inspired computer programming. It’s one of the first examples of binary coding.

This will eventually be a gorgeous sari – a 6-1/2 approx. yard length of fabric wrapped, pleated and draped.

After all that handwork, I’m glad this fabric will not be cut into pieces.